Your hub for trends, best practices and resources
542,000+ Visitors Annually!
Contact North | Contact Nord
Webinars

How to Prepare Students for Learning in Times of Uncertainty

Thursday, January 19, 2023
11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. (Eastern Time)

How can we help prepare students for an increasingly uncertain world? How do we handle a situation with too much information, too many competing interests and too many variables at work?

Answers are everywhere, but which one do we choose?

For millennia, our approach to learning has been the process of eliminating uncertainty. We look for the solution and remember it. We solve problems. We get the answer right. That’s how we’ve been taught to learn. Find an authority, find their answer, remember it. We now face the opposite problem. Advice is abundant. Solutions are everywhere.

This webinar explores the notions of learning in times of uncertainty, how to teach for uncertainty versus teaching the basics, and how we can help prepare students for an uncertain future.

Key takeaways

  • The classroom problem-solving approach can lead students to expect a “right answer” for everything
  • Real-world problems are often uncertain problems
  • Uncertainty and creativity have a lot in common
  • We need to help prepare students to work on uncertain problems that don’t always have clear solutions
  • Seeing things as uncertain and still working on them can give students hope for the future

Host:

Dave Cormier
Learning Specialist for the Digital Learning Strategy and Special Projects at the University of Windsor

Dave Cormier is an educational thinker and writer who has been exploring the ways in which the digital impacts how we teach and learn for more than two decades. He coined the term MOOC, and has spent many years talking and writing about rhizomatic learning and open education. His current work considers how the Internet fundamentally changes what students need to learn and, perhaps more importantly, what and how we can teach. It explores how we need to shift to seeing uncertainty as core to our learning processes — because that's what students need and because many of the old approaches no longer work.